


bewitched, sung moon-struck

by Belgium



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Inception - Freeform, M/M, literally NCT Dream am i right
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-24
Updated: 2019-09-24
Packaged: 2020-10-10 08:00:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20524634
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Belgium/pseuds/Belgium
Summary: It's summer. Renjun jolts awake from a dream.





	bewitched, sung moon-struck

**Author's Note:**

  * For [markohmark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/markohmark/gifts).
  * Inspired by [oh, wonder](https://archiveofourown.org/works/19169941) by [markohmark](https://archiveofourown.org/users/markohmark/pseuds/markohmark). 

> thank you to my recipient for their original fic! i hope you enjoy!
> 
> the title is from sylvia plath's 1951 poem "mad girl's love song”:
> 
> _I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed_  
_And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane._  
_(I think I made you up inside my head.)_

“Imagine,” posits Jaemin when the Earth is finally quiet and the air settles down around them like a motionless curtain that had forgotten the shape of wind, “what it would be like if memories disappeared the more you thought of them. Like dipping water from a well without ever filling it up again.” He looks at Renjun through slow, honeyed lashes, and Renjun can see the dusk brimming through them. “How will you know if your memory is whole or not? If it’s the right one or not? How do you know what’s real?”

“Easy,” says Renjun, grinning fondly. “Just don’t forget me.”

*

It’s summer. Renjun jolts awake from a dream. In it, he was falling, though he can’t place where he was falling from. Vaguely, he has the impression that he’s dreamed this dream before, seen those clouds before, like his body was remembering the feeling of gravity resisting him. As his consciousness slowly drifts back to him, he realizes that that couldn’t possibly be true. All sky was the same.

When he finally manages to crank his eyes open, he finds that he is oddly both disappointed and relieved to be safe and sound, in bed, alone, hands empty, on the mid-priced mattress he’d bought straight out of his college days. It had boasted support. Something about spinal alignment.

It was just okay. But the first night Renjun had to sleep on a different mattress after getting that one, he had stayed up all night, like he didn’t know what a good thing he had until it was gone. What was that saying again, about knowledge? The only thing you knew was nothing. Who had said it again?

*

Scientists have done studies on how animals can sense time and the answer, more or less, was temperature. In the summertime, when the air is heavy and windows got stuck and door hinges screech, caught in their plates from humidity, people often say they see the heat, reflected in glass building panes, rise from the tops of their heads and fold gently on upwards, gauzy gas fumes, soft meringue peaks, a trick of the light. 

When it came to buildings, there’s only so much of the foundation you can change. How long had people been building homes? The flesh and bones were all the same: four walls—mostly. A door, some windows. Beams—both light and steel—cascading across ceilings, through rooms. 

There was something about the reliability of a building that Renjun likes, but it was sometimes it was what annoyed him the most. Architecture was less art and more tedious calculations and HVAC codes. Maybe all assistants had to learn the bitter truth on the job.

It was Sicheng who had put in a good word in for him. Renjun hadn’t thought his senior-year TA liked him at first, until he realized that it was teaching that Sicheng was indifferent to. Renjun, though, was different. He knows this because Sicheng had told him. Said he was the only one for the job at Seo, Jung, & Lee. It had been the way he had said it, urgent, behind closed doors, closed blinds, that intrigued him.

“You notice things,” Sicheng had explained.

“Lots of people notice things,” Renjun had replied.

Sicheng had smiled, like Renjun had said something funny. “Not like you do,” he said.

*

But in the end, it was just an assistant job. Renjun sent emails on behalf of Mr. Jung and greeted visitors. He sat in a desk and said things like _ One moment, please _ and _ I’m sorry, may I take a message? _ He tinkered with Microsoft Excel. Sometimes he tucked pencils behind his ear and then timed how long it took for him to forget it was there before they fell, to pass the endless hours.

Every other week he got coffee for the office, which is what Renjun was doing when he sees him, reflected in the glass windows of an office building across the street of the cafe.

Renjun stops in his tracks.

It’s only too late that his brain supplies the _ again _ part—Renjun sees him _ again_, but he can’t recall who he is or where Renjun had seen him from. Pointy chin, long lashes, hair brushing his eyes. A million boys looked like that. Maybe it was the reflected image that threw Renjun off. People aren’t used to seeing reflections of other people, are they? 

When he turns around, though, he’s just as perfect, not at all like how Renjun feels when he sees photographs of himself. Logically, he knew that they were the right way around, and it was how people actually perceived him. But he felt alien to himself. He was him, but at the same time, he wasn’t at all. He longed for his mirror image.

Renjun looks back across the street. He’s gone before Renjun can remember who he is. By the time Renjun gets back into the office, he forgets he was ever even there. When he gets home, he is struck by the sudden fear of summer being over: the weather shifts, so slight and unexpected that it was almost imperceivable, but it lit up the same part of his brain that understood that a summer storm was about to come, that deep, primal instinct of knowing.

*

“What’s it called again?” Renjun hears himself ask in his dream. “When something’s on the tip of your tongue but you don’t know what it is? There’s deja vu, jamais vu, and…”

A soft wind blows. Jaemin laughs. “Presque vu,” he answers. “Don’t you think it’s ironic that you asked?”

*

“Jaemin,” Renjun calls. 

Jaemin freezes before he turns around, his lovely face solemn, dressed in a suit. There is recognition in his eyes. Oddly enough, he does not seem surprised. 

“Jaemin,” Renjun says again, because Jaemin’s name felt so tender his mouth. It felt so good, so cathartic to remember. He steps closer, and like a mirror, Jaemin steps in, too. “What are you doing here? I haven’t seen you since… The last time was...”

Renjun can’t recall the last time he saw Jaemin. He only remembers sitting with him in architecture lectures in college, drawing circles with compasses in their notebooks in the library, their late-night conversations, talking about structures, mazes, their dreams, hushed, in the dark. Did they walk across the stage for graduation together? They must have. They had the same major. Took all of the same classes. Talked all the time. How did they lose touch like this? When did they drift apart? It was as if Renjun went to sleep one night and everything else dissipated like smoke.

“Renjun,” says Jaemin, smiling a little now. If Jaemin’s name felt good, hearing his own, being reminded of his own existence made him euphoric. “You work here, too? How long have you been here?”

“Yes, at—” Renjun waves at his office. Strange, that he isn’t sure when he started. “How about you?”

“I start today,” Jaemin says, gesturing to his suit. “Under Mark Lee. I guess we’ll be coworkers.”

“Oh.” Mr. Lee was young, around their age, but there was no puzzle he couldn’t solve. He was brilliant. Sweet, but always at arm’s length. All of the partners at the firm were. Sometimes Renjun studied their blueprints. Everything was so calculated, in between haphazard and precise, those intricate lines, measured and balanced, everything in place. Sometimes, though, he thought those buildings they planned to build could only exist in their dreams.

*

Days go by, or maybe weeks, or months. Time passes strangely during late summer, on the precipice of fall, when you don’t know which way the pendulum will swing. Every time the heat melts away into rain, it comes back like the tides.

Renjun gets close to Jaemin again, like how they had been in university. They talk all day and night, about this and that, everything and nothing. Jaemin is sweet to everyone—charming and handsome with a winning smile, but he has a special smile just for Renjun. It’s warm and inviting and gold, like honey, a June morning. They used to watch nature documentaries in college, and the one about anglerfish luring their prey with light had kept Renjun awake at night for days. What else could be preying upon him, drawing him in with curved filaments?

It is why he bites when Jaemin shows up at his cubicle one day, apropos of nothing, golden mouth shaped into a wolf’s grin.

*

On the rooftop, Jaemin peers out into the horizon and asks, “Don’t you get bored, working for Mr. Jung?”

Renjun snorts. “Why? Is working for Mr. Lee any better?”

“Are you hearing yourself? ‘Mr. Lee’? Nah, Mark is cool,” Jaemin proclaims.

“Mr. Ju—_Jaehyun _ is cool, too,” Renjun forces himself to call his boss by his first name. “He’s super nice and pretends not to notice when I take an hour and a half for lunch.”

“So you’re not looking for another job, then.”

Renjun stops. The sun is setting, falling into the earth, casting shadows over Jaemin’s soft cheek. “What do you mean?” he says.

Jaemin smiles slyly. Not a wolf, then. A fox.

*

Mark passes Renjun a blank blueprint and says, “Draw a maze that can be solved in two minutes.”

The thing about buildings and mazes and life is that they are all finite. Sometimes it takes a while to get through them, but they all have a beginning and an end. Despite being an architect’s assistant, Renjun has no patience for math, but he remembers the pointed, smooth metal of the compasses that he and Jaemin had stolen from the math department for fun, the way his pen glided in hypnotic concentric circles. He thinks about _ pi _ and _ e._ Invisible numbers.

Renjun draws a spiral as an act of defiance. Mark laughs, delighted.

*

Dreams, though, are different. They, too, have a beginning and an end. But at the same time, they didn’t. How many times had Renjun woken up in the middle of a dream? How many times could he remember the start of a dream? But just because he couldn’t remember didn’t mean that it wasn’t real. Dreams start and stop with sleep. If you could sleep forever, how long would your dreams last? How do you measure forever?

*

Mark offers him a job within his job. “Do you know what inception is?” he asks.

_ Yes_, Renjun realizes, but he doesn’t know how he knows.

“The short answer is that it’s a dream within a dream within a dream,” Mark answers when Renjun doesn’t say anything. Jaemin is sitting with him, watching him carefully out of the corner of his eye, and Renjun feels safe. “But it’s more than that. It’s planting the beginning of an idea into someone’s head, so deep that they believe they thought of it themselves.”

“Our client Mr. Nakamoto wants to acquire Mr. Zhong’s company, which he inherits when he turns twenty-one. Negotiations haven’t gone anywhere. He’s paying us to change Mr. Zhong’s mind,” explains Jaemin.

Donghyuck, with his slinky, glistening grin, presents Renjun with a pill. Renjun hesitates, his gaze flickering between him and Mark, and then finally onto Jaemin’s patient face. His aura is so warm, even in Mark’s cold office. Why did he ever leave him? Who left who first?

Renjun takes the pill.

*

In this shared dream, Mark and Jaemin are there with him, and a city unfolds. It’s not any city Renjun has ever seen before, its silhouette a stranger, beckoning him in. _ Get to know me_, its soul says. It feels so real. He can feel the late-summer rays on his face, concrete reflecting the heat. Was it still summer, out in the real world? The days blur together.

“This is all from memory?” Renjun asks Mark.

“Never build from memory,” Jaemin cuts in. “You begin to forget what’s real and what’s not.”

Mark nods. “But building a city in your head is easy. Your mind is infinite. Let your imagination go crazy.”

And with one sweep of his hand, Mark summons structures before their very eyes. They unfurl from stones, each one from different eras and styles. People jostle past Renjun, their gauzy faces a haze in his memory. Renjun tries his hand at creation, too. He summons one of Mr. Jung’s blueprints—from memory, but technically he had never seen the finished building. He blinks and when he opens his eyes, the brusque office is there before them, windows reflecting their three figures.

Renjun squints closer at their reflections, but—

“You’re probably wondering how you wake up from a dream, right?” says Jaemin, snapping him out of his reverie.

Startled, Renjun says, “Don’t you just kind of—will it?”

“But how do you know you’re in a dream?” posits Mark.

Renjun doesn’t know how to answer. He had been wondering that himself, lately. 

Mark smiles. “It’s called a kick. How we wake up. Usually it’s some kind of fall, either in your dream or when your body falls in real life. Why don’t we try it?”

One second they were on the ground, and the next they were on a roof, the transition disjointed and hazy, but Renjun doesn’t feel the need to question it. _ How? _ he feels his mouth about to ask, but it was Jaemin’s apologetic smile, and then the brush of Jaemin’s hand on Renjun’s chest, and then a push, air knocked out of his lungs, and then the long, long fall, all the way down, gravity taking him into its arms, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men.

*

In Renjun’s dream, he breathes life into Mr. Jung’s blueprints and each brick blooms another, higher and bigger and brighter. And then he insets each window by hand and polishes it until it spits his reflection back at him, he and his mirror image both separate wholes. Paradoxically, though, one completed another.

“I’m Renjun,” he tells his reflection.

His reflection smiles back at him. “I am, too,” he says.

*

“How are you feeling?” asks Jaemin one day.

Renjun looks up from his work for Mr. Jung. It was just mundane data entry, nothing like the work he and Mark and the others do behind closed doors, closed eyes.

When Renjun is too slow to answer, Jaemin asks another question. “Isn’t it weird no one can see feelings but they’re still real? Even though they’re all in your head? You can think yourself into happiness, sadness, anger, jealousy. It’s all about your mindset.”

Renjun laughs. “Are you drunk? It’s in the middle of the day. We’re at _ work_.”

“I’m just thinking out loud,” whines Jaemin.

“Congrats,” says Renjun. “I didn’t know you could think.”

Jaemin pouts. “I guess I walked right into that one.”

He watches Renjun do some more calculations in Excel. It was nice. Familiar, like this used to happen often. “Hey, do you remember college?” Renjun suddenly asks.

Jaemin studies Renjun, carefully, tenderly, as if he were committing every detail of Renjun’s face to memory. It made him feel shy and exhibitory at the same time. A part of him wanted to hide. The other wished the moment would never end.

“What do you mean? Do I remember physically being there? Yeah, I went to so many lectures my eyeballs bled,” Jaemin jokes.

“But you remember, right?” implores Renjun. “You remember what it was like?”

“What do you mean?” Jaemin says again, eyes softening.

Renjun doesn’t know.

*

It takes days or weeks or months more, but Donghyuck finishes doing his research on Chenle and his strict, rich father and Chenle’s best friend Jisung, who is rumored to be more than just his best friend, if Donghyuck’s salacious eyebrow-raising were any indication. In Renjun’s dream world, Donghyuck perfects each figure, copies their cadence and gait. It’s uncanny, the way he transforms into different people as if he understood their thoughts, knew their very essence. Renjun sometimes didn’t know himself.

On the day before Chenle is set to board the plane that they will hijack, Jaemin asks to see the dream Renjun had constructed.

“It feels so real,” Jaemin comments, running his hands through the textures—marble, concrete, steel, the wool carpets. Cold, smooth glass. “You have so many windows.”

Renjun squints. “Is that a bad thing?”

“It’s just that you have so many windows,” Jaemin non-answers. “Sometimes reflections make it hard to keep track of things. You know, like light sources and stuff. And you have to make sure everyone has one. It’s such a small thing to forget. But sometimes it’s the littlest things that shatter an illusion.”

Renjun thinks back to when he saw Jaemin across the street from the cafe, that perfect reflection, his beautiful face mirrored in the glass. What if this was all a dream? He laughs quietly to himself. That couldn’t possibly be true.

Then he thinks back to when he saw Jaemin for the first time ever. He draws a blank.

*

When Renjun wakes up, he thinks he remembers. Jaemin had walked into that lecture hall that first day, as charming and lovely as he is now. They had accidentally made eye contact but they were instantly drawn to each other. They had struck up a conversation about something trite, what all nervous college freshmen talked about when they were equally as lost as they were ready to bolt—something about family, their high school, what they studied.

“What’s your major?” Jaemin had asked.

Renjun had rolled his eyes and gestured to the room. “Architecture. You?”

“Yeah, same,” said Jaemin, laughing sheepishly. “But funnily enough, I was really bad at geometry in high school.”

“Wow, do I have bad news for you,” Renjun had said, laughing, too.

“You have a favorite shape, geometry nerd?”

“The circle,” Renjun had answered. Jaemin had been amazed that he had an actual answer. “Because there’s no beginning or end. It doesn't matter where you start or stop. They go on forever.”

Then Renjun wakes up for real.

*

Everything goes according to plan, to Mark’s great relief. Donghyuck becomes Chenle’s father in the first level of the dream. “You’ll never be enough,” he says to Chenle. “Just give up.”

They loop Chenle’s subconscious through level by level, deeper and deeper. The architecture of the dream evolves with each level, which Renjun designed to become softer, more organic as they led Chenle to Mark, charming and earnest as he convinces him to surrender his mind.

Renjun and Jaemin’s end of the heist was over, but they lingered in the surface-level city that Renjun built in his head, both real and unreal. Renjun was the one who convinced Jaemin to stay. Said it was for backup, just in case, but they both knew it was a lie. Throughout the inception, Renjun hadn't been able to stop thinking about their past memories together. He doesn’t know what he forgot, only what he remembers. Even then, how did he know what was real?

They are on a windy rooftop now, the November chill settling into their bones. Even in a dream, it’s cold and bitter. They’ve always gravitated up here. This high up, they’ve lost sight of Mark and Chenle and Donghyuck, now wearing Jisung’s face in the last level, and it is just them and their shared histories, a lifetime unspoken. 

“Imagine,” posits Jaemin out of the blue, like he was reading Renjun’s mind, “what it would be like if memories disappeared the more you thought of them. Like dipping water from a well without ever filling it up again. How will you know if your memory is whole or not? If it’s the right one or not? How do you know what’s real?”

“Easy,” says Renjun. “Just don’t forget me.”

Jaemin laughs ruefully. “If only it were that easy.”

They catch each other’s gaze. The setting sun lights Jaemin afire, gold and glowing, and it lures Renjun in. How could he help himself from leaning into Jaemin’s body heat, like magnets chasing each other across poles? In his head, a cautionary tale plays on loop, but it’s disjointed and Renjun can’t see or hear what it is.

As their lips meet, tender and soft, cathartic, Renjun hears the glass shattering from the windows all around them. It doesn’t hurt, though. Or maybe it hurt so much that his mind tunes it out. Don’t people say you can’t feel pain while you’re dreaming? If so, why does his heart ache?

The earth shakes under their feet, the tremors catch up to them, but Renjun still chases after Jaemin’s soft mouth. The world could end, for all he cares. The world _ does _ end, and the building Renjun so carefully constructed crumbles, and suddenly they plummet to the ground, a million feet away but closing in to swallow them whole. Still, they are entangled in each other, his hands around Jaemin’s neck, Jaemin’s palm resting on his chest.

Before they hit the earth, as they fall in zero gravity, meteoric but unbearably slow at the same time, Renjun catches a glimpse of himself reflected in a plane of glass. He only realizes that it’s not his mirror image when it’s too late—but then they crash, an impact, a burst of light, then only black, and then nothing at all. One Icarus goes to sleep. The other, in the glass: flipped, not a reflection but a photograph.

*

It’s summer. Renjun jolts awake from a dream. In it, he was falling.


End file.
